Labour In Name Only: Do We Really Need Another Tory Party?

 

It has been virtually impossible to look away from the extraordinary Tory implosion that we have witnessed over the last few weeks and months.

As you’ll probably know, I don’t just write about the Conservatives, but it has been difficult to write about much else of late, whether that be the end of Boris Johnson, the brief guest slot from Liz Truss, or the arrival of the billionaire Goldman Sachs Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. 

But now it’s not so difficult. 

Put the impossibly awkward Keir Starmer in front of a camera or a microphone and it doesn’t take long for you to remember why you don’t like Keir Starmer, you don’t trust Keir Starmer, and you certainly don’t want Keir Starmer. 

Now I know what comes with calling out the knobbish knight of the realm as I have been doing it for the last two and a half years, as have many of you. 

I’ll be called a “Tory enabler” and a “grifting Corbynista” - and much worse no doubt. But think of a number that is less than one and you’ll be able to count up how many fucks I give.

Let me explain where I’m at. 

I’m utterly fucking sick of the sight of the Conservative party. I cannot stomach watching another illegitimate Prime Minister prance around on the world stage as if they carry the blessing of the British people. 

The Tory ABC - Austerity, Brexit and Covid - have done significant damage to our people.

Austerity was an unnecessary ideological failure. It didn’t save a single penny of public money and has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.  

Austerity 2.0 is on the horizon. The Tories believe they can cut their way to growth but the only growth we see before us today is the growth in inequality. 

Austerity is not a fiscal necessity, it is a political choice. Be absolutely clear about that.

Brexit has been an hugely expensive unmitigated disaster. The promise of sunlit uplands ended up in the same bin as Boris Johnson’s ‘forty new hospitals’ and Keir Starmer’s ‘Ten pledges’.

And Covid. Sure, the Tories couldn’t stop the arrival of Covid-19, but nobody forced them to wait for Dido’s disease-spreading horse racing festival to go ahead before telling us to say home, protect the NHS, and save lives, nor did anyone trick them into sending 30,000 elderly and vulnerable Covid patients into care homes, and I’m pretty sure the Tories didn’t need all that much convincing to hand out billions of pounds worth of Covid-related contracts to their friends and donors. 

The Tories need to go, no ifs and no buts. 

But that doesn’t mean the Labour Party will get a free pass from me and people shouldn’t confuse my disdain for the Tories with any sort of support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. 

Like many of you who are kind enough to read this, I am a democratic socialist, so a choice between a right-wing billionaire friend of the hedge funds and a centre-right fraud that screwed any chance of a Labour government with his disastrous Brexit policy shift really is no choice at all. 

I know, even the worst-possible Labour government is better than any Conservative government, right? Wrong. 

Let me tell you why. 

You know what you get with the Tories. You have hated them for as long as you can remember. You would probably cut your hand off and give your first-born to Suella Braverman before you vote for the Conservatives. 

But Keir Starmer’s Labour party has betrayed you. They have cheated you. They have stolen your hope and replaced it with mediocrity. 

They preferred a Conservative government headed up by Boris fucking Johnson to a real Socialist Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn, so they can spare me the old flannel about getting behind the intolerable quisling Starmer because hell will freeze over before I lend any support to that red Tory charlatan. 

I expect a Labour leader to stand alongside the poor and the working classes to fight the Tories class warfare - not tag-team with the fucking elitist bastards. 

Keir Starmer is an enemy of the working classes and an obstacle to the progressive alternative that we need to challenge an establishment that is made up of very frightened little men.

You cannot challenge the establishment with the establishment, did we not learn this from the Brexit catastrophe? 

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage pitched themselves as “anti-establishment”, and a remarkable number of fools sucked it up because it tasted like sovereignty.

Starmer is a vital cog in the establishment wheel, he’s the no-real-change candidate, and he has routinely failed to oppose the nightmares in Downing Street anywhere near as much as he opposes the socialists in the Labour Party. 

That’s a huge issue for me. 

There’s absolutely no point telling me we need to come together to oust the Tories, because of the undeniable fact that Keir Starmer *is* a fucking Tory. 

Keir Starmer is a serial traitor. No principle is indispensable in his quest for power. Remainers, leavers, socialists, the soft left - you were just a stepping stone for the deeply untrustworthy Labour leader. 

You only need to look at events in the Commons from earlier in the week following Prime Minister’s Questions to get an idea of the staggering levels of hypocrisy on the Labour front bench. 

The repugnant Blairite lickspittle Streeting seems to think dementia is a laughing matter, and Starmer agreed that despite being inappropriate, Streeting’s “senile” jibe towards Jeremy Corbyn was said “in jest”. 

This is how seriously they take bullying in Keir Starmer’s cesspit of a Labour Party. The grubby hypocrites are in no position to call out bullying until they get their own house in order, whenever that might be.

Streeting is a fine example of what this Labour Party stands for, or maybe it is more a case of who they stand for.

Back in January this year it became apparent Streeting received a £15,000 donation from a chap named John Armitage. 

Armitage has donated more than £3 million to the Tories and he is a major private healthcare investor. His Egerton Capital firm holds more than $800 million worth of shares in private health giants, United Health. 

So why would a big time healthcare privateer such as Mr Armitage want to donate £15,000 towards the office costs of the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care? Beats me. 

There’s every chance the Conservatives will lose their majority at the next general election - and so they should do - but we all need to ask ourselves how society will benefit from a Labour government led by a stand-for-nothing social conservative.

A little bit of tinkering around the edges isn’t going to cut it, Mr Starmer. We need more and we deserve better than a choice between rehashed Thatcherism with Sunak and Blairism for the 2020’s with Keir Starmer. 

A Labour leader shouldn’t be flirting with the idea of further austerity. 

A Labour leader should be able to unashamedly stand by nurses, doctors, railway workers, posties, civil servants and anyone else that is so sick and tired of being undervalued by the Tories for years on end. 

A Labour leader should be able to win an election with a positive and ambitious vision for the future of our people. Where is that vision and what does it even begin to look like?

So I reckon you can see where I am coming from.

Let’s not pretend the current poll lead enjoyed by the Labour Party has anything to do with Keir Starmer, or any of his front bench for that matter. 

The only reason Labour find themselves ahead is quite simply because so many people have had it up to their eyeballs with the Tories. It is not an endorsement of the Labour Party but a rejection of the Conservative party. 

And this takes us back to our broken political system. A choice between shit and shitter really is no choice whatsoever. 

Surely we deserve something better than a battle between an ideology from the 1980’s and an ideology from the 1990’s? 

The inequality that we live with today didn’t just suddenly appear twelve years ago. ‘Things can only get better’ was a pop song, not a fulfilled promise.

I will be supporting socialist candidates at the next general election. The Labour Party don’t need my support and they don’t need my vote, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be getting it. 

Until next time, 

Rachael 

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